By Xeni Jardin at 11:35 pm Saturday, Jul 24
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This piece in today's
New York Times outlines a number of the presumed truths about 9/11 which the 9/11 commission report effectively debunks. Among them:
The commission's report found that the hijackers had repeatedly broken the law in entering the United States, that Mr. bin Laden may have micromanaged the attacks but did not pay for them, that intelligence agencies had considered the threat of suicide hijackings, and that Mr. Bush received an August 2001 briefing on evidence of continuing domestic terrorist threats from Al Qaeda.
Link to NY Times story,
Link to downloadable report, and
here is Kottke's helpful outline of the lengthy report's structure.
By Xeni Jardin at 6:27 pm Saturday, Jul 24
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Action-feature
Ong Bak: Muay Thai Warrior promises a truckload of Thai kickboxing mightiness. Completed in 2003, it opened July 24 in Japan (under the title
Mach) and is
apparently slated for North American
release this November. In
this whup-tasstic preview, a hero with flaming feet stomps opponents in all directions. Lots of aerial fight choreography without wires. Forget what I said before about
that Bollywood guy -- stuntman-turned-actor
Phanom Yeerum, aka Tony Jaa, is my future husband.
BoingBoing reader JohnD says, "Its low budget, virtually no action for the first half, then it gets as intense and exciting as you could want it too, despite the rudimentary story," and reader Garrett Gee says, "Fight sequences were great, it made me want to train again."
Link to Quicktime trailer, and Link to the movie website. Link to the company that holds the copyright. Link to IMDB details, Link to alternate French site.
(via Warren, thanks for the update Tanner, and thanks very much to Joi Ito for the kind translation assist! )
Update: BoingBoing reader mediamelt says, "You seriously need to check out the trailer for
Born to Fight, the latest from the director and fight choreographer of Ong Bak. Some seriously insane stunts here. Watch for the truck scene, I hope that stuntman got a huge bonus! BTW: Ong Bak's plot is so-so, but the stunts are nothing short of revolutionary. You can purchase a region-free DVD of the film here (same place I got my copy)."
Update 2: Reader Jon Silpayamanant says, "There is another French site that you might be interested in as it has a download section where you can get "The Making of Ong-Bak": Link. The reason, as I mention in my blog post, that France had already been distributing the film for several months is because of Luc Besson. There's a little blurb about how the Thai director, Prachya Pinkaew, left a little message to Besson in Ong-Bak in the French site."
By Xeni Jardin at 2:21 pm Saturday, Jul 24
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Eduardo Arcos, editor of the Spanish-language blog
ALT1040, is conducting an online investigation into a website suspected of recruiting teenage girls in Mexico for child porn. He's soliciting help from other bloggers, and using the "comment" feature in his blog as a way to exchange info with concerned citizens throughout the blogosphere. Together they're collecting data, with the apparent goal of revealing who's behind the suspect site -- and seeing to it that appropriate action is taken to protect potential victims. Here's my clunky attempt at translating Arcos' summary post:
A site called TV-whores with a theme and intentions that are very clear, contains the following text: Girls from 13 - 19 years of age: earn thousands of pesos simply by taking photographs. More information here. (...)
The page in question offers thousands of pesos to 13-19-year-old girls for taking digital photos. You don't have to be naked, you can be in a bikini or underwear, it says... but it's more than suspicious."
Link (in Spanish)
By Cory Doctorow at 12:53 pm Saturday, Jul 24
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Larry Lessig has written a long open letter to Bill O'Reilly that opens "You have declared a 'war' on the New York Times. That's good for you, good for them, and good for our democracy: Strong opinions deserve strong spokesmen. Your battle will help sharpen a debate about matters important to the Republic." Lessig then proceeds to take O'Reilly to task, point-by-point for an ongoing campaign of pathological libel agaist Jeremy Glick, the son of a 9/11 victim who spoke out against the Bush Presidency and the war. Glick appears in Outfoxed, a new documentary that criticises O'Reilly and his network, and in answering the charges raised in Outfoxed, O'Reilly has chosen Glick as a symbol of what he hates, and in order to make his point, he has been lying repeatedly about what Glick said and did. Lessig's point is that attacking a giant media organisation is one thing, but using your on-camera bully pulpit to repeatedly slander someone who has already lost so much is unconscionable.
# on February 5th, you told your viewers that "Glick was out of control." He may have been out of your control. But you and our government have got to learn that just because someone disagrees with you, he doesn"t become a security threat. Again, watch the interview, Mr. O"Reilly. He was not "out of control."
# on February 5th, you told your viewers that Glick was "spewing hatred for this program." Watch the interview, Mr. O"Reilly. He criticized you, not the program, for unethically using sympathy for the 9/11 victims for your own political ends. He was calling your behavior improper. You had not earned his hatred.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 12:25 pm Saturday, Jul 24
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BugMeNot -- a service that creates spoof entries for registration-required sites -- has produced a mock registration form aimed at people associated with reg-reqd sites that exemplifies many of the critical problems with registration on the Web:
What percentage of sites do you visit that require registration?
What percentage would you be comfortable with?...
Would you be willing to have an RFID chip inserted under your skin in exchange for a free, 12 month newspaper subscription?
What if we told you that you couldn't access news unless you agreed?
Link
(
via Waxy)
By Cory Doctorow at 2:58 am Saturday, Jul 24
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The Friends of the Creative Domain is a UK activist group supported by the Campaign for Digital Rights, EFF, and the Union for the Public Domain, created to foster free culture, free software, open content and the like. Its first project is to help the BBC win the right to put its archive of TV and radio programming online in the next version of the BBC's Charter, which is being negotiated right now.
FCD has just put up a Wiki for gathering and organising materials related to its campaigns -- it's the right place to go to get started if you want to pitch in.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 2:48 am Saturday, Jul 24
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Some time ago, I blogged about Telltale Weekly, a site that records and posts audiobook editions of public domain texts, charging small sums ($0.25-$4 or so) for MP3/OGG/AAC downloads.
I just revisited the site and gosh, there's been a lot of good stuff posted since I last stopped by (there's an RSS feed for new titles that I've just added to my newsreader): classic stories and essays by Twain, Jack London, L Frank Baum, O Henry; poetry by Walt Whitman; political speeches and essays by Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass... My cup runneth over.
And there's good karma at Telltale: after five years or 100,000 downloads, TTW will release each track into the public domain under a CC license; also, partial proceeds from Ogg downloads are donated to the Xiph Foundation, who support Ogg development.
Link
